Fresh Eggs? No Way : Dinosaurs Laid These Specimens, on Display at County Fair

Like any inquisitive 10-year-old, Tomi Vest wanted proof Thursday that the Los Angeles County Fair is all it is cracked up to be.

So she headed straight for the dinosaur eggs. “Are they real, or are they just molded?” she asked her father.

Bill Vest of Azusa squinted at a jagged-shelled, 72-million-year-old velociraptor egg on display with six others near the center of the fair’s gem and mineral exhibit. He pronounced it genuine.

“If they were phony, they wouldn’t have them in a vault,” Vest decided as he sized up the 1 1/2-ton safe holding the egg collection. Tomi nodded in agreement.

The fossilized eggs have attracted dinosaur-size crowds during the fair, which ends its 24-day run Sunday at the Pomona Fairplex grounds. Officials say the eggs represent seven prehistoric species, making the collection the largest ever shown.

The eggs are owned by geologist Randy Elliott, 46, of Brea. They are displayed in the vault behind bulletproof glass and guarded by security officers.

“I’ve been collecting for 37 years,” said Elliott, who values his collection at $2 million. “I started as a kid at this very fair. I bought my first geode here at the fair when I was 9.”

These days, Elliott makes his living selling geodes and other polished minerals at a shop at Knott’s Berry Farm. He plows his profits into his dinosaur egg collection, which now totals 11.

Interest in this year’s “Jurassic Park” movie has prompted the crowds around the vault, said Arlene Billheimer of Altadena, who has been curator of mineral and gem exhibits for 14 years. “People are coming to the fair specifically to see the eggs,” she said.

Lower admission prices also have lured fair-goers. As of Thursday, more than 1 million people had visited the 487-acre site. That is about 100,000 more than attended during the same period last year, fair spokesman Sid Robinson said.

Along with carnival rides, horse racing, arts and crafts exhibits, and activities such as glass-blowing demonstrations and Hula-Hoop contests, the fair will feature a national sheepshearing contest at 6 p.m. today and at 7 p.m. Saturday.

As old-fashioned as all of that sounds, it doesn’t come close to the displays in the mineral and gem building.

One is a 14-foot-long skeleton belonging to an unidentified species thought to be 8 million years old. Unearthed three months ago in Lakewood and nicknamed Waldo, the creature was discovered by workers bulldozing for a transportation project.

Other exhibits include 28-million-year-old saber-toothed cat skeletons and a huge brontosaurus knuckle thought to have survived 195 million years.

Onlookers watched wide-eyed as Elliott unbolted the bulletproof glass and pulled out a 74-million-year-old Pinacosaurus ankylosaurid egg. Guard Chester Hall gently nudged 6 1/2-year-old Chris Witscher of Corona out of the way.

Elliott pointed to a dark golf ball-size egg in the vault. He said recent CAT scans of the egg at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Fontana and at UC Riverside suggest that it contains the unhatched embryo of a prehistoric bird, the giant pteranodon.

“I dropped that egg one day on a concrete floor,” he confessed. “I was storing it in a sock. I was surprised: It didn’t break when it hit. But I was scared.”

No wonder. The egg is considered priceless now, although Elliott bought it for $400 earlier this year from an American importer. The importer was trying to make amends for reneging on an earlier deal to sell Elliott another egg. He had backed out at the last minute after deciding it contained a dinosaur embryo. It didn’t, but the $400 egg did.

Onlooker Harlan Polk, 75, of Ontario, was fascinated. “They find these things in Tibet, Montana, China,” he whispered to a friend, Hazel Nufer, also of Ontario. “But as far as recapturing DNA like in ‘Jurassic Park,’ I think that’s rather far-fetched.”

Jessica Doran, 8, of Arcadia, confided she had eaten an egg for breakfast. A chicken’s, not a tyrannosaurus . “I don’t think a dinosaur egg would taste good, even with salt and pepper,” she said.

Tomi Vest decided the egg with the embryo posed no threat of hatching, even in Thursday’s Pomona heat.

“If it does, it would probably be too little to eat anybody,” she said. “But it might bite. So I’d still run.”